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Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. It can be done by governments and private organizations or by individuals who engage in self-censorship. It occurs in a variety of different contexts including speech, books, music, films and other arts, the press, radio, television, and the Internet for a variety of reasons including national security, to control obscenity, child pornography, and hate speech, to protect children, to promote or restrict political or religious views, to prevent slander and libel, and to protect intellectual property. It may or may not be legal. Many countries provide strong protections against censorship by law, but none of these protections are absolute and it is frequently necessary to balance conflicting rights in order to determine what can and cannot be censored.

177 Recent Stories

Pakistani readers were not able to see the International New York Times' front-page story, as it was censored by the newspaper's local printing partner. Entitled "What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden," the Saturday cover story by Carlotta Gall was comp...

U.S. first lady Michelle Obama defended the importance of free speech and Internet freedom in a talk in China on Saturday. Obama spoke at the Stanford Center at Peking University in Beijing, as part of a goodwill tour in the country. In what could be...

Most people in countries with unrestricted Internet access take it for granted, forgetting that many countries around the world have censored, limited or no Internet access -- even though it's a human right, according to the United Nations. This does...

As Russia's military tightens its grip around Ukraine, the country has taken new measures to hinder its opposition's ability to organize online. The Russian Prosecutor's General Office has ordered Roskomnadzor, a federal media oversight agency, to bl...

It's been called "Censorship Fiasco 2: Electric Boogaloo." News over the past 72 hours has been dominated by the implosion of Mt. Gox, once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, and a report from Glenn Greenwald on how British intelligence agents hav...

LinkedIn rolled out a Chinese language version of it professional networking site Monday, a move that could help the company greatly increase its user base. LinkedIn already had an English version of the site available in China with more than 4 milli...

Centuries of invaders couldn't break the Great Wall of China, but a Chinese yuan can. Well, the "Great Firewall,” at least. A series of one yuan banknotes became a whole lot more valuable after being stamped with a quick response (QR) code -- a type ...

Governments around the world are trying to censor more online content than ever, according to Google's latest transparency report on government takedown requests. When compared to its last report, Google received 68% more requests to remove content i...

For almost a year, four journalists at Bloomberg News were investigating the political connections of China's richest man, Wang Jianlin. In October, according to The New York Times, Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler told them the story wouldn...

All firewalls have some holes in them, even the Great Firewall of China, the online censorship system that the Chinese government uses to block sites it deems inappropriate for its citizens. A group of Internet activists has apparently found a way to...

In parts of the world where repressive governments control the Internet with unassailable firewalls, netizens don't see the same web that people in other countries can. Now, Google wants to give people in these countries a tool to circumvent those in...

Just in time for Banned Books Week, the Internet's largest book-review site is hosting a meltdown over a new policy that many of its members feel is a blatant act of censorship. The problem that Goodreads attempted to solve in its recently announced ...

China’s ambitious Shanghai Free Trade Zone is designed to welcome foreign investment and open an attractive yuan-denominated financial sector to the rest of the world. But it’s hard to boast about free trade credentials behind the Great Firewall of C...

Nine years after Mark Zuckerberg quit Harvard University to build Facebook, one of the university’s political science professors, Gary King, decided this year it was time to launch his own social media site. But King didn’t set up his Chinese social ...

Google said a lawsuit by Max Mosley, Formula One’s former president, asking it to block any further search results referring to a “Nazi-themed” sex party would create unprecedented censorship on the Internet. Lawyers for Mosley asked a French court t...

Russia has been making international headlines for banning all kinds of stuff over the last couple years. On Tuesday, Vitaly Milonov promised Russia would arrest both athletes and tourists visiting the Olympic games next winter should any of the gay ...

Last week, Russian activist Alexei Navalny was arrested for politically-motivated embezzlement charges stemming from his use of a social network to organize public demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin. His platform of choice? LiveJournal. ...

All UK Internet providers will block online porn later this year, prime minister David Cameron said. And if you want to see smut, you're going to have to ask for it by the end of the year. Cameron also announced a ban on possessing online porn depict...

Despite promising users that it "wouldn't police porn," Tumblr has already made changes to the way adult or NSFW content shows up within its network. Although Tumblr won't actively police content and ban users from uploading nude or NSFW photos, the ...

One of the growing concerns for human rights campaigners is the increasing evidence of Internet censorship in many repressive regimes around the world. During the Arab spring, for example, Egyptian leaders "switched off" the Internet in an attempt to...

Governments love to use the actions of their enemies to help push their own agendas. Alarmed by reports that American spies are gathering data from popular web services, Ilya Kostunov -- a lawmaker from Vladimir Putin's United Russia party in the low...

Edward Snowden has fans among the Chinese, who know a thing or two about Internet surveillance. In leaking information about a top-secret U.S. government data collection program, Snowden argued that an increasingly authoritarian government could use ...

Saudi Arabia has suspended popular Internet messenger application Viber for failing to comply with unspecified regulations. The Communications and Information Technology Commission also warned that “appropriate action will be taken against other appl...

Jordan's censorship law finally reared its ugly head on Sunday, when the country blocked at least 281 sites from public viewing. It's the first major implementation of the country's amended Press and Publications Law. That bill's passage in September...

The French investigative publication Reflets discovered that American company Blue Coat is currently providing the government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and that of the Islamic Republic of Iran with software to filter and spy on their countries...

If you wanted to listen to North Korea’s English-language propaganda in the past, your only option was to buy a shortwave radio or listen to edited clips on the Voice of Korea website. Now, according to North Korea Tech points out, you can listen to ...

Hell is other Twitter users -- according to the head of Saudi Arabia's religious police force, anyway. Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said Wednesday that Muslims who use Twitter or other social media have "lost this world and his afterlife,"...

Google released its traditional six-month Transparency Report Thursday, the seventh since the company started releasing this type of data in 2010. And, according to the report, which covers July to December of 2012, attempts by governments around the...

Suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might have a social media presence on Russian site Vkontakte and on Twitter, but finding him on Facebook is harder than you might think. It's become a trend that pages in support of criminals show up...

Earlier last week, a Chinese propaganda official said China's Internet-based "new media" were threatening the Communist party. Using one of Mao Zedong's most famous phrases, Ren Xianliang, vice-minister of propaganda in Shaanxi province, wrote in an ...

After Google unceremoniously announced it would be killing Reader later this year, much of the outraged response focused on its use in the U.S. But there's a whole other aspect to the service: for thousands of users around the world, it's one of the ...

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